The Forty Year Rule Of Nostalgia

Adam Gopnik:

So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)
To cases. In the nineteen-forties—the first decade in which all the major components of mass culture were up and running, even early television—the beloved focus of nostalgia was the innocent aughts of the early century, a time imagined as one of perky girls in long dresses and shy boys in straw hats. “Meet Me in St. Louis,” a film made in 1944 about a fair held in 1904, was perhaps the most lovable of the many forties entertainments set in the aughts, from “The Magnificent Ambersons” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a musical made in 1948 about a song written in 1908. The nineteen-fifties saw lots of movies about the First World War—“The Seven Little Foys,” anyone?—and kicked off our Titanic romance, with “A Night to Remember.” The decade also brought the revival of the jazz of the teens, with the essentially serious music of Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton recast by middle-aged white men in straw boaters and striped jackets as something softer, called Dixieland.
Twenties nostalgia ran right through the nineteen-sixties, beginning with the 1960 TV series “The Roaring 20’s.”

I was definitely enthralled in the '40s and '50s when I was a late teen.  I even wanted a Homburg, even though I never intended to wear a suit with it. Later on, I found out the fifties weren't all that exciting, especially if you were a woman or black.  It was kind of like today's Republican Party.  If this rule holds up, that would mean the Godawful Seventies will be coming into fashion for the nostalgia set.  Actually, I thought we got through that a few years ago.  Hopefully those shitty days will never come back into fashion.